Combining different contact information into one record

[Gregory_Ferenst]

I’m trying to figure out how to combine different contact information for a single person in one record. So, I have one table where all messages to a person is logged: sometimes it will be an email or a phone number. I have a separate record where the primary key is the persons name and that record includes their email and phone number.

If I want all instances of a person’s contact info to be included in their record in the contacts table, how do I combine them?

So, everytime a message is sent to their email or phone, when I click on their contact record i would see it all in their one record.

Thank you and let me know if I can clarify

[Mac]

Are you using the person’s name as a linked field in the messages table?

[Gregory_Ferenst]

Thanks! It depends. the messages table auto collects messages from different sources. So, the “from” field in messages could be the persons phone, their email, or their name, depending on how the application identifies the source. I cant change how the message field is populated, so want to auto organize it in airtable. This make sense?

[Mac]

Yes it does, there might be something you could do with the Zapier search functionality, but I think you would have to setup the zap per user. @openside any suggestions here?

[openside]

Yep. like @Mac suggested, you could perform a lookup against the contact via zapier (or our product makes it even easier) to retrieve the user whenever a new message is added. This assumes you have the incoming message’s phone number/email already associated with the contact.

Or, you could create tables for Emails and Phone Numbers where the emails and phone numbers are the respective primary keys for their table. These would both have a Contact column that is linked to their contact record. Then when a new message the phone number/email columns would be links to these 2 tables and would auto-link on insert (be sure to test what happens if email/phone number doesn’t already exist in linked table).

[Gregory_Ferenst]

Thanks. Just so i understand, id need a new table for every form of contact that there is (so a tab for phone and email)? And then let’s say there’s two contacts for each person, I’d need a third table to combine them all?